Maker Foundation’s CEO Rune Christensen stepped down this week, leaving a carefully built DAO to run the protocol in his place. The move marks the beginning of a new phase for the lender and arguably for DeFi itself, as the ecosystem’s first dapp transitions into a fully decentralized organization. “Today, the Maker Protocol is self-sustainable…

Gitcoin rustles up millions of dollars in funding to support Ethereum developers. Lighthouse gives away Ethereum 2.0 software. And EthHub provides educational services on the Ethereum ecosystem gratis.  These endeavors are known as public goods, and no surprise, Defiers love them, and want more of them. But influential voices in DeFi, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik…

A new NFT project, backed by some real star power, will have you burning green in more ways than one. “Stoner Cats” is an upcoming series of animated shorts about, well, house cats high on marijuana. And it will only be available to those who drop some greenbacks on its unique, algorithmically-generated NFTs.  The series…

Neon Lab’s announcement that it will offer its Ethereum Virtual Machine scaling solution on Solana made quite a splash this week. It also prompted a cryptic response from 0xMaki, Sushiswap’s “fearless leader,” as he’s identified on the project’s website.   0xMaki responded to Neon Labs’ tweet with a string of pencil on paper emojis, the sun,…

The competition to bring euro stablecoins to DeFi is heating up.  Lending protocol C.R.E.A.M. Finance said it will make EURt, Tether’s euro-pegged stablecoin, available in its money markets to borrow and lend. At $62.28B according to its transparency page, Tether issues the largest supply of dollar-pegged stablecoins, USDT, and is looking to reproduce its success…

European Defiers better buckle up, because regulators in the EU are attempting to tighten the rules on crypto transfers.  On July 20, the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, announced a package of legislative proposals to strengthen the EU’s anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing (AML/CFT) rules. The legislative proposal moves to apply…

Polygon is raising a $100M fund to support blockchain game developers and NFT creators, and tapping the chops of Atari, the trailblazer that gave the world Pong, Space Invaders, and Asteroids. Polygon has already attracted over 100 NFT and gaming projects, according to awesomepolygon.com. But now the scaling solution is pursuing a far more ambitious…

Sushi has officially announced their next generation automated market maker (AMM) Trident.  While SushiSwap started out as a fork of Uniswap, the announcement explicitly states that Trident is a new AMM “and not a fork.” Trident will focus on capital efficiency (ie: the ratio between invested capital and return) and integrate Sushi’s many products. Trident…

The crypto market’s all-time highs are just a memory. The summer slump now seems to be deepening into something more disturbing. And it’s not so far-fetched that Bitcoin may give back all of its gains since the first quarter if bears continue their rampage. Gird yourselves, it’s white-knuckle time in crypto. On Tuesday, Bitcoin had…

Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO and Bitcoin enthusiast, wants to bring decentralized finance onto the OG cryptocurrency protocol. On July 15, Dorsey announced that his financial services and digital payments company, Square, is creating a new business focused on bringing non-custodial, permissionless DeFi services to Bitcoin. The new company, which is called “TBD” (just like…